In this note, we generalize the weak maximum principle in [4] to the case of complete linear Weingarten hypersurface in Riemannian space form $mathbb{M}^{n+1}(c)$ (c = 1, 0,-1), and apply it to estimate the norm of the total umbilicity tensor. Furthermore, we will study the linear Weingarten hypersurface in $mathbb{S}^{n+1}(1)$ with the aid of this weak maximum principle and extend the rigidity results in Li, Suh, Wei [13] and Shu [15] to the case of complete hypersurface.